As a shopper enters a store, the retailer uses Wi-Fi to track her movements, interests, and shopping habits, providing a treasure trove of insight valuable to merchandising and product development alike.

And as advances in Wi-Fi promise increasing location precision and beacons promise pinpoint location based services, the future appears to be smooth sailing, right?

Well, not exactly.

Tracking the position of mobile devices accurately and correlating to personal data has been one of the most sought after Big Data objectives. And not just for retailers — the potential wealth of business value from data has drawn piqued interest across nearly all industries.

Yet in the real world, issues arise from both technology challenges and privacy concerns alike.

Technology challenges include:

• Typical Wi-Fi accuracies in the 7-to-10 meter range (though Angle of Arrival and improved location analytics promise dramatic improvements)
• Infrequent mobile device probing to conserve battery power
• Interference from metal shelves & fixtures, water in products (and people!)

Privacy qualms speak to the heart of transformation in the Internet of Everything (IoE) age. IoE, after all, is the explosion of network connections among people, process, data, and things — and promises to be one of the most impactful periods of change in our history. And the people element is in some ways the whole point — to make our lives better, healthier, more efficient, and so forth. But the people issues will be just as challenging as those that arise around technology. Read More »

Tags: analytics, beacons, Big Data, business, cmx, data, devices, EMSP, experiences, interference, lbs, location, location based services, mobile, mse, privacy, probing, product, retail, retailers, shopper, shopping, technology, value, wi-fi, wifi

As you may have read, Apple’s iOS 8 will come with some changes to the way MAC addresses are exposed in Wi-Fi probe requests. Apple’s intent was to provide an additional layer of privacy for consumers and target those companies that offer analytics without providing any value to the end consumer. We’ve been getting some questions about what this means and how it impacts our Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX)  solution, so we wanted to clear this up for our customers.

What does this mean for you? 

First and foremost, Cisco has always been dedicated to privacy for our customers and their end-users. There are four aspects of privacy that are built into our CMX solution:

1. Anonymous Aggregate Information: All analytics are based on aggregate, anonymized location data.

2. Permission-based: Users have to opt-in to join a Wi-Fi network or download an app

3. MAC Address Hash: Users’ MAC addresses can be hashed before exposing to 3^rd party apps

4. Opt Out: End-users are always presented with the option to opt out of location-based services

The true value of CMX analytics for organizations is in aggregate location data to be used for business analysis to improve the customer experience for end-users. Providing customers with high performing Wi-Fi not only keeps always-on mobile users happy and opens the doors to delighting customers with more personalized experiences, but also helps provide more granularity to those aggregate trends to feed back into the experience creation machine. Win-win.

What does this mean for our CMX value proposition? Read More »

Tags: address, aggregate, analysis, analytics, App, Apple, application, Cisco, cmx, connect, consumer, customer, data, download, engage, experience, IOS, ios 8, ios8, lbs, location, location based services, location-based, login, mac, mac address, market, meraki, mobility services engine, mse, network, onboard, permission, Presence, privacy, probe, probe request, services, trend, value, value proposition, wi-fi, wifi, wireless

Let’s face it:

• videos on the internet are a dime a dozen these days
• there’s no way to differentiate one brand from another when it comes to the impact of video
• YouTube is the only channel for video distribution and there’s no value in anything else

If you believe any of this, then you definitely need to join me at an upcoming Social Media Week panel.  I will join several industry colleagues in providing a crash course on how to stand out in a video world.

In this session entitled, “How to Stand Out When Everyone’s Using Video,” I will focus on the finer points of using video to engage audiences and integrate it with organization’s social efforts. With me will be Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3; Jordan Hoffner, president of digital media at Electus; and Melissa Chanslor, social media lead at Text 100.  Moderating the panel is a true technology and social media maven, Liz Gannes of All Things D.

During the discussion I promise we won’t just tell you that video is important, and that it provides a different channel to communicate with various audiences — everyone knows this by now. Instead, we will be specific about why it can be a great tool for a brand (especially if you’re a media company), and how to get the most value from it. Read More »

Tags: All Things D, brand, cisco eos, Electus, Social Media Week, value, video